New York City THC Takes Home the Hardware at Inaugural CPT Scott Pace Memorial Tournament

By Craig Rot

HIGHLAND FALLS, NY—The West Point invitational tournament, which celebrates its thirty-eighth year, has been newly renamed the CPT Scott Pace Memorial Tournament, and began with a touching opening ceremony celebrating the life and sacrifice of former West Point Team Handball captain Scott Pace, who was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2012.

This sport, which is indebted to the cadets of West Point, took a moment to honor one of its fallen heroes, and I feel it would not be fitting for me to labor on with this recap without acknowledging the impact all of the cadets over these last four decades have made on the sport we love.

A most heartfelt thank you.

On the court, the tournament played out as hoped, with club teams traveling from Quebec, Montreal, New York City, D.C., North Carolina and Chicago to take on West Points Gold and Black on their own home courts. Over the course of three days, games were fierce, exciting, and hard fought, as is expected, and in the end, it was Sherbrooke and West Point Black emerging from Group A, and New York City and Chicago from Group B.

A play-in game accounting for the last-minute cancellation of the Levis from the north, found the D.C. Silencers battling to break Black’s grip from one of the semi-final slots, but the cadets grasp was too strong, and moved on with a semi-final game securely in hand.

The semis proved to be rather one-sided affairs, with Chicago emerging from one semi with an impressive 26-18 victory over Sherbrooke, and New York City putting together their best play of the tournament to stifle the raw athleticism of a young West Point Black squad that went on to win the bronze medal.

The final, however, did not go as planned for me and my Chicago teammates, and New York City won itself still yet another championship with a definitive 26-19 win. Kristo Kolk and Ryan Homsy, NYC teammates, won MVP and MVG honors respectively, earning themselves the tab for a round at a local establishment before everyone abandoned campus in anticipation of the storm that wasn’t.

CORRECTION: My apologies to the members of both the D.C. Silencers and the U.S. National Deaf team for mistakenly identifying the club from Washington D.C. as being the national team.

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